2011/03/07 by Joleen K. Carlberg, Steven R. Majewski, Richard J. Patterson +4 · 2 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Astronomy #Astronomy and Astrophysical Research #Astrophysics #Astrophysics and Star Formation Studies #Geometry #Giant star #Metallicity #Physics #Red giant #Red-giant branch #Rotation (mathematics) #Spectral line #Stars #Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies #Surface gravity #astro-ph.SR
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/0004-637x/732/1/39
Accepted for publication in ApJ. 25 pages, 9 figures, 3 tables. Tables 1 and 2 are provided in their full form as plain text ancillary files
arxiv created 2011/03/07 · openalex publication_date 2011/04/13 · arxiv updated 2015/05/27 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
We present the results of a search for unusually rapidly rotating giant stars in a large sample of K giants (∼1300 stars) that had been spectroscopically monitored as potential targets for the Space Interferometry Mission's Astrometric Grid. The stars in this catalog are much fainter and typically more metal-poor than those of other catalogs of red giant star rotational velocities, but the spectra generally only have signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) of ∼20–60, making the measurement of the widths of individual lines difficult. To compensate for this, we have developed a cross-correlation method to derive rotational velocities in moderate S/N echelle spectra to efficiently probe this sample for rapid rotator candidates. We have discovered 28 new red giant rapid rotators as well as one extreme rapid rotator with a v sin i of 86.4 km s −1 . Rapid rotators comprise 2.2% of our sample, which is consistent with other surveys of brighter, more metal-rich K giant stars. Although we find that the temperature distribution of rapid rotators is similar to that of the slow rotators, this may not be the case with the distributions of surface gravity and metallicity. The rapid rotators show a slight overabundance of low-gravity stars and as a group are significantly more metal-poor than the slow rotators, which may indicate that the rotators are tidally locked binaries.